Mordecai Appeals to Esther

BY Lore Ferguson Wilbert

A few months after the lockdowns began in March, my husband and I moved from Texas back to my hometown in New York. Moving in the midst of a country-wide shutdown has felt disorienting.  Ordinarily a vibrant college community, my village has felt more like a ghost town these days, with furrowed brows above masked faces (a necessary reality of living through a pandemic) replacing the friendly and welcoming smiles we expected to see. I have wondered, “Why did you move us here now, Lord? Why, in the midst of a season like this are we in yet another transition?”

I left this place a decade ago, which was a decade after a tragedy that tore my family apart. On a rainy April morning, two of my younger brothers left for an errand and only one returned alive. My brother was 14 years old when he died. I was 19. For the next ten years my life felt empty, lifeless, confusing. My entire family fractured, never to join together whole for another holiday, wedding, or reunion. I felt divided even from myself. After ten years of trying to piece myself together again, I left here, and found hope and healing in Christ and therapy and the blessed relief of time. But coming back home has reminded me of all of it again. Even though the Lord has healed and redeemed, I still remember the grief of those days. Coming back in the midst of the pandemic has highlighted those griefs in some ways too. My questions to the Lord increase.

Several months ago, though, through a series of events I could have never foreseen or orchestrated, two young people began to frequent our home. Their grief is similar in some ways to mine, the loss of a young brother suddenly this year. I sat this morning and thought of Esther in the king’s house, likely wondering why. “Why am I here? Why have I been brought to a place where there is the potential for so much pain? Do I think I will be protected from the pangs of grief that are common to all people and particular to me?” 

Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, admonished, “Don’t think that you will escape the fate of all the Jews because you are in the king’s palace” (Esther 4:13), and I hear his echo in my heart too. But perhaps, like Esther, I am here for this time in this place for this reason. For such a time as this? To lend my washer and dryer, my kayaks, my tea, my table, and my tears to two suffering people whose grief cannot be held by them alone.

Pastor and theologian John Piper once wrote, “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.” It helps me to remember this because even in the most grievous moments, I know there is another moment twenty, thirty, fifty years away for which that previous moment prepared me. It doesn’t lessen the grief of twenty years ago, but it gives it meaning today which I could not have foreseen then. It shapes the meaning of today. And this is what Esther must have learned and come to know in these verses. This time, this aching, awful time, is held secure by a God who knows the future, who ordains the steps of His children, and who has prepared a better Esther, a better Savior for all His people to come. 

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